Keep feeling fascination

Brady’s love for game endures

Ron BorgesMonday, September 03, 2012

Credit: Chitose Suzuki

BRADY: Still going strong as 13th NFL season begins.

Barely 24 hours had passed since old friends were gone. Deion Branch .â€‰.â€‰. gone. Dan Koppen .â€‰.â€‰. gone. His former acolyte Brian Hoyer .â€‰.â€‰. gone. Tom Brady was shocked by none of this because as he moves into his 13th year in the National Football League, nothing he sees on the playing fields or in the front office can shock him anymore.

Still something has been lost, and a cold reminder remains. A reminder of what awaits everyone who invests his life and his dreams in sports. Eventually they came for his idol, Joe Montana. Eventually they came for Jerry Rice. On Friday they came for a former Super Bowl MVP, a former Pro Bowl center and a former aide-de-camp. One day, for sure, they’ll come for him, too.

It is a sobering thought and so it must be compartmentalized, like so much of his life. To continue to succeed, to continue to be what he most wants to be, there is no other choice.

“Yesterday is just the worst day of the year,” Brady said of Friday night, the evening the Patriots pared their roster to the 53-man limit. “You see guys walk out who were your friends and your teammates. You know their families, their wives and kids. It’s the business part, not the football part of the game, and you realize how cutthroat it is.

“It’s what we signed up for, but it’s tough, man. It’s not about what you’ve done in the past or what you represent. It’s a business decision. You can’t control it. All you can control is the football part. All you can control is your performance and your attitude.”

Brady’s unfailing ability to do both in the face of shock, departures, debilitating injury, victory and defeat is what has kept him on top for more than a decade in what is most assuredly a cutthroat business. As he prepares for Sunday’s season opener against the Tennessee Titans, Brady is still considered among the two or three best quarterbacks in the league and among the very best to have ever played the position.

He has won every award they make and become a multimillionaire while doing it. His biography of achievement stretches through 14 pages of the team’s media guide. None of that will help him on Sunday in Nashville and neither will regrets over the departed. The only thing that can help him then is that one thing has never changed.

“Obviously at some point it all comes to an end,” the 35-year-old Brady said. “We all have hopes and dreams and those are good motivation, but you never know if they’ll let you fulfill them. Every year players change. Coaches change. What remains is your attitude.”

Setting him apart

Difficult as it might be for someone who has been washed over by a tsunami of success, Brady’s attitude toward his work remains identical to what it was when he first arrived as less than an afterthought in 2000. If anyone knew what he would become, 198 players would not have been drafted before him.

That they were is something he has never been able to quite shake, and three Super Bowl rings and five Super Bowl appearances have not altered that or the approach that has been the foundation they were all built upon.

He may throw offseason passes in Los Angeles or Costa Rica or Brazil as often now as he does in Foxboro, but he throws them all the same. He may watch film on a larger sofa or in a soundproof room, but he still watches just as often.

“I’m pretty unchanged,” Brady said. “I still feel I’m trying to earn the respect of my teammates and my coaches. My approach to practice is the same. There’s no shortcut in this. There’s no way to half-ass football. It’s too demanding. When that becomes your approach you don’t last very long.

“Things have changed in the offseason a little bit from when I was 23, 24 with no kids. I had more time on my hands then, but I’d say football still drives me on a daily basis because it’s a game of performance.

“A lot of times people try to find balance in life as they get older, but if you’re going to be successful in this business sometimes you have to acknowledge your life is going to be out of balance for a number of years. When my boys ask why I have to leave, I tell them, ‘Dad, has to go to work.’ That’s how it is unless I’m unemployed, and nobody wants that.”

This offseason was the first in a number of years that Brady wasn’t surgically repaired or rehabbing broken or dented parts. A knee, a foot, a shoulder, a hand. Tune-ups one year, major rehab another. Such wear and tear can break the spirit as well as the body, but Brady has avoided that because the game has never become a burden to him.

Football remains his fascination and his obsession. For many professional athletes that can wane with the years, and when it does, focus is lost, and soon after, so is your job. It is the nature of the beast he rides 16-to-20 Sundays a year. It demands everything or leaves you with nothing.

“Physical skills have never been my strong suit anyway, so I don’t have to worry too much about that,” Brady said with a laugh. “In terms of quarterbacking, the physical aspect of it is you have to be able to throw with enough velocity that guys don’t have to be wide-open for you to complete a pass, but speed has never been part of my position. It’s not like other positions where if you lose that you’re in trouble.

“The ability to throw accurately is extremely important and I don’t think that will ever go away. I’ve found ways to take care of my legs, my arm and my head. I believe anybody can make good plays. It’s how many bad plays do you make? When the play is not there, what did I do?

“You can’t not do anything for six or eight months and come in and expect to be a good quarterback. If football was that easy, a lot more people would be doing it. You have to think about it all the time. You have write things down that come to mind. You have to wake up in the middle of the night after a bad practice. That’s the (required) thought process.”

Age-old question

It is a process that has been unchanged since he first knew football was his passion, yet this year something has changed. Not for Brady, it seems, but for the people around him.

The questions are slightly different from the outside now. Some are questions he finds annoying at times, because the assumption is that they apply to him when he believes they do not.

“I feel like this year I’m getting a lot of questions about my age,” Brady said. “In so many ways I don’t feel any different than I used to feel. I still feel like I’m a 25-year-old kid trying to earn a job here.

“It’s never been easy for me so I don’t know what it means to take a film session off. I never did that, so when I’m asked if I get bored, I don’t have an answer. It’s not like I’ve got it all figured out. If you think that, it’s probably a sign of the end. Then the game passes you by.

“But I’ve never really had any other interests. It’s not like I have another career planned. It’s not like I have hobbies. I’ve loved this since I was 8. I feel very fortunate to have found it.

“I think it’s interesting that as an athlete everyone is lumped together. People say, ‘This is the lifespan of an athlete,’ but that’s only if the process is the same for every athlete. If mine is different, why is the result going to be the same? I’ve never approached it like everyone else. My process is mine.

“People ask me about the sacrifices you have to make but they aren’t sacrifices to me because I love the preparation. I love the process.

“At this point I’ve thrown the football so many times and dropped back so many times. The mental part is what brings the enthusiasm to something I’ve done thousands of times. I’ve got to do it because if I don’t, who else is going to do it for me?”

No end in sight

No one, unless it is his replacement, and Brady has made clear he wants to put that off for as long as possible. For as long, actually, as his body allows, because his mind remains transfixed by the mysteries of a game the public believes he long ago mastered.

“Defenses change,” Brady said. “Players change. There’s not one play I don’t think I’ll throw a completion, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. In practice you run a play and there’s one side of the ball coach won’t be happy with. As a coach, at the end of a practice, they’re always unhappy. All the coaches I’ve been around were that way.”

Brady is not, but he is seldom satisfied. There is always a better way to run a play, attack a defense, best utilize a teammate. This summer he has been trying to figure out how best to do the last item with newly acquired receiver Brandon Lloyd, a particular favorite of offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels. Much is expected of Lloyd and he has been adamant that his work with Brady has only begun. Brady adamantly agrees.

Early in training camp Lloyd admitted they had no rapport yet, that trust and understanding could only be built over time. The two were often seen working together, trying to develop the anticipation and timing Brady had with Branch for so long.

“We’re trying to build a foundation,” Brady said. “The extra time we’ve put in together I hope will pay off, but I don’t want to make predictions. I hope we can string a lot of good things together, but when people ask me about Brandon and Randy (Moss), it’s unfair. Randy was a great player, friend and teammate. It’s unfair to compare anyone to him. It’s like comparing someone to Jerry (Rice).

“Brandon is different. Wes (Welker) is different. We have to find ways to maximize what they can do. That’s the process we’re going through. It takes time.”

Time is one thing Tom Brady never seems to run out of, when it’s being utilized to solve the jigsaw puzzle that is winning in the NFL. While results are not a given and, as several of his friends learned last week, neither is opportunity, time is there to be used. As his 13th NFL campaign approaches, Brady’s faith in that alone remains unbroken.

“There are no entitlements on our team,” Brady said. “You have to put a lot of pressure on yourself. You always have to earn it. It’s what I love about it.”